InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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Go, See & Do. A Guide to Running a Gemba Sprint
This article is a guide to organizing a Gemba sprint; a sprint where teams, leadership, and management work together with the ultimate goal of coming together as an organization. Ahmad Fahmy explores what is needed to set up a Gemba sprint, how to organize and run one and provides some dos and don'ts to make a Gemba sprint effective.
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How SwissLife France’s Enterprise Architects Used Lean to Raise Their Level of Influence
This article shows how Lean has been successfully applied to its own activities by an Enterprise Architecture team. Making the flow visible, loving problems and having fun solving them, and welcoming voice of the customer feedback were some of the practices that helped the team navigate the flow. Lean allowed them to better live to their purpose, both individually and as a team.
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Q&A on the Book Engineering the Digital Transformation
The book Engineering the Digital Transformation by Gary Gruver provides a systematic approach for doing continuous improvement in organizations. He explores how we can leverage and modify engineering and manufacturing practices to address the unique characteristics and capabilities of software development.
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Q&A on the Book Level up Agile with Toyota Kata
In the book Level Up Agile With Toyota Kata, Jesper Boeg explores how to apply Toyota Kata to drive improvement in organizations that are using or striving to use agile ways of working. He shares his experience from combining agile with Toyota Kata to enable organizations to keep improving towards their goals.
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Scrum & The Toyota Production System, Build Ultra-Powerful Teams
How to use the Toyota Production System, as a knowledge-building system, to reveal learning topics on which to work to develop outstanding Scrum teams for exceptional results.
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The Importance of Metrics to Agile Teams
This article outlines the importance of and proposes meaningful Agile metrics for teams seeking to raise overall performance and whose members seek to continuously self-improve. It emphasizes that team members should democratically agree and manage these metrics. It also advises what to look for in tools that track performance against agreed metrics over time.
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A Different Meaning of CI - Continuous Improvement, the Heartbeat of DevOps
This personal experience report shows that political in-house games and bad corporate culture are not only annoying and a waste of time, but also harm a lot of initiatives for improvement. Whenever we become aware of the blame game, we should address it! DevOps wants to deliver high quality. The willingness to make things better - products, processes, collaboration, and more - is vital.
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How to Mitigate the Pain of Getting and Giving Feedback
Companies that encourage open and honest feedback do better than companies that do not. Nonetheless, giving feedback is difficult because social and physical pain share some of the same neural circuitry. Hence, feedback can feel physically painful, as Sarah Hagan discusses in her 2018 QCon San Francisco talk . Hagan uses scientific research to demonstrate how to give feedback properly.
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Q&A on the Book Evidence-Based Management
The book Evidence-Based Management by Eric Barends and Denise Rousseau explores how to acquire evidence, appraise the quality of the data, apply it in your management decisions, and assess the impact of your decisions.
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A Great Engineer Needs the Liberal Arts
Much of what helps you become a great software engineer, and create outstanding software that people want to use, comes from outside the world of STEM. The ability to effectively analyze a problem, evaluate different options, and engineer a solution requires skills taught in the liberal arts.
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Observability-Driven Development for Tackling the Great Unknown
How does observability-driven development differ from monitoring? As our distributed systems become increasingly more complicated and as our silos break down for DevOps testing, automation, and efficiency, ODD arises as a superset of monitoring to understand your code’s unknown unknowns. Includes insights from Honeycomb Founder Charity Majors.
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Three Keys to a Successful “Pre-Mortem”
Talking about what might go wrong acknowledges that many things are out of our control, and that we might mess up the things which are within our control. To have this conversation safely involves a structured activity called a pre-mortem. If held with some regularity, and always with creative problem solving time at the end, it can build a safe space for adaptation in the face of adversity.